Glass Pieces
by Orange Diary
Summary: Light Yagami knows a second chance when he sees one. When he finds himself possessing his sister's body, is it the end of his plans? Meanwhile, Near receives a message predicting the arrival of a new Kira. Warning: gender-switch, mentions of character deaths, MatsudaxSayu maybe?
1. Chapter 1: Second Chance

**Welcome to my first fanfic! To be honest I never thought I could write a fic until not too long ago. But after being bitten and re-bitten by plot bunnies I gave in. My first ideas were nothing like what Glass Pieces is - they mostly consist of wild adventures of Naruto characters in nonNaruto-verse, though they all wilted before they started. Glass Pieces is my precious baby story, so please read and tell me what you think!**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.**

* * *

**Prologue**

_He knows it is Ryuk when something seizes up inside his ribcage. That eternity when time stops completely and he can't feel anything except the brightness of the sun and his own breath stuck in his chest and Ryuk is writing, oh God, Ryuk has written his name…Ryuk! He doesn't want to die! He can't die not here not now not when the sunlight is so damn piercing… Fear clenches his heart, spiralling up his windpipe and locking his jaw._

_And L is just standing beyond the railing, watching._

_He is here for his death, the gloating bastard. He wants to see what he could not achieve himself finished by his successor. Right? _

_Wrong. Because **he **won. He killed him and he's dead and he died before he knows and he won but why isn't he looking at him? Does he not want to acknowledge him, even now? The delusional fool. _

_Look at me! He wants to yell. I was smarter. I was faster. And that's why you are the one standing in the shadow and I am bathing in light. But he can't unclench his jaw and his heart is crumbling in on itself and he can't see the light anymore and he doesn't want to die. _

_Why can't he see his face?_

_Dad, he thinks, latching onto a fragmented image. Mum. Please._

_I don't want to die._

* * *

**Chapter 1: Second Chance**

_"Don't be conceited. I only dropped the notebook. You think you were chosen?" _

Light Yagami knew a second chance when he saw one.

It wasn't so much the light and colour he registered. After all, pictures in your mind were called visualising. Snapshots of images were commonly known as imagination. When a familiar string of them slipped through your consciousness you would recognise them as memories.

But sound was different. It was sharp and distinct in your mind that was impossible to be present in a dream. People's voices in dreams were less heard but rather_ understood_. Dreams were, in another word, soundless.

At least Light Yagami's dreams were soundless. So when he heard the slipping of soft slippers soles on wooden floorboards and the painfully familiar creaks of the stair railings he knew he was alive.

He was alive? He was alive! The hows and the whys were drowned out by a flood of relief and elation.

He was alive. He was home. He was Light Yagami.

_L,_ he wanted to laugh. _Can you see this? I killed you and you're dead, you killed me but I'm alive. Who's the winner, huh?_

He lifted his hands to his eyes. He never thought being alive was this exhilarating. He could hear his own ragged breathing to the solid rhythm of his heartbeat. Everything so was overwhelmingly dizzying he couldn't hold his hands still. They trembled as he curled his fingers. He almost couldn't feel them. It was like his mind and body were functioning separately, and he was watching on the other side of a lens, through which every drop of colour, every thread of sound was highlighted and thrown back into his mind. He dissected them like a glass prism to a rainbow, and greedily inhaled all.

_L, oh L,_ he thought giddily. _How laughable, this situation is. What do you think? They all thought it was over. The despicable albino brat thought it was over. How utterly laughable._

And now, he, Light Yagami, was going to turn the tables on him, grant him a taste of what it felt to be completely defeated. He would collapse his fortress like a house of cards, watch his face when he realised his confidence was really erected on paper-thin ice, watch him skate along intricate threads destined for Hell.

He would achieve it.

His vision focused onto the back of a chair and he reached out.

Suddenly tiles loomed. Cold diffused through the skin of his palm. He realised with a lurch that he was on the ground, his nails finding purchases in the cracks.

His eyes burned. Somebody was screaming. No, _he_ was screaming. Rasping wretchedness tore out of his throat in truncated shrieks. Tiles morphed into black holes shuddering soundlessly, the cold, fogged up glass and his crushing heartbeats… but he was lifted by soft hands and warm shoulders.

He was crying?

Transparent droplets suspended in his vision, hung on shaking brown tresses, tickling his nose. It was the scent of his mother. He stopped screaming. A wave of tiredness washed through him and he pressed closer, his thoughts somewhat lost.

"Mum," he rasped. Her arms tightened around his shoulders and he felt her whisper into his neck. "Sayu, Sayu..." she said, over and over again.

_Sayu?_

The pit of his stomach tumbled and he was suddenly aware of the cold seeping through his shins, his mother holding onto him like she never wanted to let go.

_Hold on, Sayu?_

Something happened to Sayu. Something that he didn't know about. Something so significant that had rendered his mother shaking on the dining room floor. Possibilities rammed into his heart, knocking out his breath and he gasped, the awful question unwilling to be shaped on his tongue. He curled and uncurled his fingers by the warmth of his mother's body.

She unfolded her elbows and held him at arm's length. "Sayu," her gaze caressed the contour of his face. Tears dipped into the corners of her mouth, which curved into a grimace of a smile. "I have you. Mummy is here for you. Always."

Her face collapsed and she crushed him once again to her chest with a ferocity that sparked fear in him.

"Sayu… I'm so glad. Mummy is so glad you're here."

* * *

In his entire life, Light Yagami had never been recognised as 'Sayu Yagami's brother'. Nobody said "Hey, that guy. That's Sayu's brother. Apparently he's really smart." Though once when he waited around the corner at Sayu's school, he overheard a conversation between two boys in uniform. One said, "You know Sayu Yagami? You know, from Art? Yeah, apparently she's Light Yagami's little sister. I know right? She's in my Geo too."

The truth was, there were plenty of times when he was associated with his sister, and vice versa, and consequently compared, but the connection was never established on their physical similarities.

That was why, in the mirror now, he saw nothing of himself.

Sayu's hand reached up to cup Sayu's face, Sayu's trimmed nails brushed over Sayu's scalp. Her skin had turned so pale it took on a somewhat transparent quality, Light realised. Due to months of inactivity in a wheelchair, Sayu had become so fragile she couldn't stand for more than half a minute without leaning on her desk for support. The lively air that usually surrounded her had disintegrated into something almost dead, like dust over unpolished glassware. Her chin-length fringe dangled limply in strand in front of her dark-rimmed eyes, lighter and stringier than he had imagined.

He never remembered her to look so haggard and gaunt. Though the reason may lie within his obsession with his ultimately fruitless plan to wipe out the Task Force and the SPK before his death, due to which he never visited home.

_No, the plan wasn't flawed to begin with. It was all Mikami's stupidity._ He scowled but Sayu's face glared back at him. It shocked him into tottering backwards and bumping into a bed, his knees buckled and he collapsed on the soft mess.

_I'll take a shower,_ he thought shakily. _Warm water always makes thinking easier._

Taking a shower proved to be much more physically demanding than he thought would be. He avoided facing the mirror for the most parts but it still felt so... wrong. It wasn't like he had no knowledge of the female anatomy or that he never saw his sister naked (though that last time was when he was twelve and she was nine, under their mother's order to bring Sayu a towel, and a lot had changed since then), in fact, knowledge of such issues was unavoidable when you shared an apartment with a girlfriend (especially as said girlfriend was not at all modest by nature).

It felt wrong because this body wasn't supposed to be his.

_It's because the mass distribution is different,_ he concluded. After having his whole life getting used to his own body, whether you were a tennis genius or not, it was all back to square one. So he took the safer option of plugging up the drain for a bath instead, to lessen the risk of injury.

"Sayu," his mother called from behind the door. "Are you showering?"

"Yes!" he hollered over the noise of running water and the fan. Or least he tried to yell, but his voice, more accurately Sayu's, seemed to have weakened a lot. He couldn't even shout one word without the end cracking.

"Do you need any help?" God! Did she really think… well, maybe Sayu did need to be bathed before. He didn't care enough to know these things.

"No, I'm alright, Mum."

"Okay, then. Be careful." She walked off but came back a moment later. "If you need any help, just yell. I'll hear you from the kitchen. Alright?"

"Mhm_," Light Yagami versus common porcelain bathroom facility? Ridiculous._

The water is gradually filling up and his plan for thinking time was about to go down the drain. All he wanted to do now is sleep. He vaguely heard her say something else and something rang like a doorbell. Or was that the phone?

_Now to proper thinking._ Right now, he needed to find out the Task Force's current status, as well as that of Near's. _Near_… his mood darkened instantly. Now that he had a second chance, he was going to make that egotistical little snot regret ever being born into this world.

That being said, there was also the question of whether he was actually still alive at the moment. How much control did he have over Sayu's body? He couldn't assume it was his soul that entered Sayu's body. For all he knew, there could be no such things as souls. It could be his memories. He could be lacking in some crucial information regarding the Note's effect on the memory of the user. The _dead_ user.

In that case, why Sayu of all people? It could be the fact that Sayu was close to him in his childhood, so their memories may have had overlaps. Light dismissed this option instantly. Despite being in a similar environment and exposed to similar external stimuli, he, older by four years and by far more mature than his sister would have a completely different perspective to the same experience. So it would not be because of their memory ties.

It could be due to affection and loyalty on her part that allowed him to gain control of her body. But when it comes to devotion Sayu could not have been the one who loved him most. If love were the key, he would most likely be strutting around in blond pigtails by now. So that wasn't it.

One way or another, logically, if his memories did in fact replace Sayu's, it would indicate that Sayu had none when he occupied her mind. She lost hers on that day in a glass box.

He sighed with exhaustion. The waterline was creeping up incredibly slowly. _I'll be asleep before it fills up, dammit._

He rubbed his eyes. At this moment it should be _his_ mind at work, right? If it was Sayu's limited collection of neurons and glial cells delivering electric impulses right now, it would explain his current unfocused thoughts and his high susceptibility to fatigue. After all, if he could survive synchronising his biological rhythm to the activity pattern of a true insomniac, succumbing to hot water was out of the question.

And here was another question. It was February 19 today. He died more than three weeks ago. Why was there a gap? Why three weeks? He signed again. It was probably better to think about what he was going to do now rather than putting more stress on Sayu's body.

He would get his hands on the notebook. That was a given. It was what his second chance was for.

_I do need a bit more details to actually start planning,_ He frowned. _I'll start from Matsuda. Being Sayu actually has…_

Suddenly, it felt like somebody had gotten a hold of his head and was crushing his skull between their palms. The excruciating pressure forced his face to scrunch up and his fingers scratched the bottom of the tub in convulsion.

_What…?_

Then as suddenly as it started, the strain disappeared as if it was never there, leaving him feeling somewhat light and deflated.

"What is…? I'm back?" Light heard Sayu's voice said, and he had a sudden, horrible notion that _he_ did not say that.

He tried shaping his right hand into a fist but it didn't respond. _Oh crap._

"Mum! _Mum!_ HELP!" Sayu cried. There were hurried footsteps and a crash. Then it continued dashing up the stairs. "MUM!"

Right before the door burst open, a thought struck Light. In his previous life he was a lying, two-faced bastard. And now, given a second chance, he had become a girl with a split personality. Was that his punishment for playing with people's lives?

* * *

**And so it begins... **

**Glass Pieces is going to be a multi-chapter fic, though it will be pretty short-I'm predicting 5 or 6 chapters. I will be updating approximately monthly, hopefully more frequent than that. ****Don't worry, I won't abandon it! I know it sucks to follow an abandoned story. And like I said, Glass Pieces is my brain child after all. So please review! Pick up any mistake I've made, tell me whether you think it's good or bad, or there's something terribly wrong with my entire fic. I must say I've never written much in my life or taken my English Exams seriously (English was my worst nightmare last year, and I'm not taking any English related course this year). But I haven't found the antidote to plot bunny poisoning so yeah, I'm stuck writing this when I should be calculating forces in Popsicle-stick bridges. Anyway, I look forward to your reviews!**


	2. Chapter 2: Through Glass

**I lied. I said I was going to update monthly but it's now two months. Reasons being evil projects and eviler exams. I'm terribly sorry so please don't hate me, guys.**

**Anyway, now that I have another two weeks of schoolessness in front of me I'll try to pull something out of my hat soon. But for now, please enjoy the second chapter!**

* * *

**Chapter 2: Through Glass**

_"Yo, Matsu. It's me, Asahi. How ya doing my man?"_

Since he took control of his sister's body, the idea of losing it had never entered Light Yagami's mind. Why would he? It was an opportunity and even fools wouldn't let it slip out of their grasps. Now he knew he had made a mistake. He had assumed that the swap was 'meant to be'. He forgot, momentarily, that his sister's body was not entitled to him, nor was it in any way a 'meant to be' scenario.

And now, he was stuck between frustration and a childish sense of loss; if he had known he only had so little time, he would have done something. At least something more than just sitting around and running a bath that he didn't have time to enjoy.

He turned his attention back to Sayu's own awareness. Now this was a strange situation.

It was like watching a film, the camera dipping and swaying in sync to whatever the director wanted you to focus on. The only difference is that no film director would torture their audience with such dizzying frames. With his vision torn towards objects in sudden lurches, Light was feeling increasingly exasperated and not just a little sick.

He wondered if it was what Sayu felt before she came back.

He kept trying to settle his sight on a particular person seated just to the left, but Sayu's eyes only ever flitted from Sachiko's face and down to the smooth rim of her mug.

"I, I… Mum, I was so scared," she babbled. Sachiko rubbed her back soothingly. "Someone else was talking, and moving and I wasn't… It wasn't me!"

"It's okay, everything is fine now," Sachiko said repeatedly. Sayu didn't believe her, or couldn't hear her.

"I couldn't do anything." she said again, and lapsed into silence. She gripped her mug and watched the steam unfold from the surface of the liquid.

The clock on the wall ticked four times. The heater hummed stagnantly. Matsuda hissed from where Band-Aid touched broken skin.

"Had I been a nuisance?" Sayu whispered.

"Oh Sayu," Sachiko said. "Of course you weren't! We were worried but that's because we care for you. It's been so long since I've heard your voice."

She motioned towards Sayu's tea.

"Hurry and finish it before it gets cold," she turned to the dining room. "Do you need some antiseptic, Matsuda?"

"No I'm fine, thanks," Matsuda gave a nervous smile.

"How... How long?" Sayu stared at Sachiko with wide eyes. Sachiko took a moment to understand.

"Oh! Around five months or so."

"Five?" Sayu squeaked.

"Yes," Sachiko replied and moved to the kitchen to fill up the kettle again. "A lot of things have happened."

Sayu hunched unmovingly over her mug.

_That's right,_ Light thought. _Things happened._

He was getting rather tired of this conversation. Couldn't they just spit it out already? That way he could at least gloat over Matsuda's misery when he realized Sayu would hate him for killing her brother, regardless of the justice behind it.

Sayu exhaled and set her tea down, giving a start when she noticed Matsuda, and her hands darted up to smooth down her hair. She fiddled with the towel around her neck self-consciously – her appearance was not exactly sightly.

"Hi, Matsuda. What are you doing here?"

Matsuda stood up and leaned on the table.

"Hi, Sayu. Um... I was just, um..."

"Matsuda is very caring, Sayu." Sachiko interrupted. "He came around quite often to see you when you were sick."

Matsuda shrivelled back into his seat on hearing that. There was another pause, filled by vigorous scrubbing sounds from the kitchen.

"Ah, well, thank you," Sayu said. She picked up her mug once more and looking around the room. It felt somewhat different. The furniture was in the right place, the heater was on, everything looked just as clean. Then it hit Light; it was too empty. Besides the bare essentials, everything else – the vase, the tablecloth, his trophies – was gone.

_Where's everything?_ He wanted to ask.

"Where's Dad?" Sayu asked.

Matsuda visibly stiffened. Sachiko turned to Sayu, her mouth opened but nothing came out. Tension stretched across a tangible thickness.

Sayu blinked.

_Here it comes,_ Light thought.

Matsuda answered her, surprisingly.

"I'm s... Your father has passed away. I'm very sorry."

In situations like this, most people would be more than happy to take it as a joke. But Sayu was emotionally and physically drained, and Sachiko's expression spoke more than ten thousand "really?" and twenty thousand "really." There was nothing left for Sayu except crushing grief and excruciating regret.

"No!" She stared at Sachiko, who avoided her eyes in response. Sayu's metallic mug clunked heavily against wooden floorboards. Clear liquid splashed on her slipper and bled around her sole.

"No..." she whispered. Her gaze swam from Sachiko to Matsuda and back but she saw only his face, his rugged beard and lined eyes. "It's not… It can't be..."

The last time she saw him was only days ago, yet it was five months; her memory of him was so lively, yet he was dead. Her body, her mind, her memory, everything, _everything_ was a lie.

She clutched her head and screamed.

To Light it was almost as if the space surrounding him splintered into shards. Black crackled in vertical fissures around him, through him. He screamed because the cracks were black holes and the gaps contained nothingness that was hungry for his very material. The vibrating air rolled across his skin – funny, this was the first time he realised he had skin – and he thought he was going to explode, dashed to pieces by inky lightning. Beyond the static filled void he could still hear Say's screams. When her sobs died after an eternity, only then did Light's storm stop. He let the ground catch him and laid there. It felt like carpet.

When he opened his eyes again, Matsuda was gone and Sayu had a new mug. Sachiko hovered over her tight-lipped.

"How's Light?" Sayu rasped, exhausted. "Does he know about Dad?"

"Shh," Sachiko placed Sayu's hands on the outside of the mug. "You don't have to worry about anything besides yourself right now. Do you still want a shower?"

"No, I want to go to bed," Sayu rejected the tea and leaned back into the sofa. "Is he still living with Misa?"

"Don't worry about that," Sachiko started walking towards Sayu's room. "Do you want me to fix up the electric blanket?"

Her words set off a chorus of alarm bells inside Sayu's head. She grabbed the hem of Sachiko's sweater.

"What happened to him?" She demanded. Sachiko turned to her slowly, her stoicism from before was unravelling, fast.

"Sayu," She said. "Please."

Sayu let go of her.

"What happened?" Horror crept into her voice. "What happened to Light?" She was almost screeching. "_Why won't you tell me_?"

Sachiko fell heavily into an armchair and covered her face with her hands.

"He's dead too, isn't he," Sayu whispered, watching her mother's shoulders shake. "He's… dead."

* * *

_He had been wandering through this place for a while now. All the distorted reflections had ceased being frightening and strange, and instead they were grating on his nerves. Who wouldn't be annoyed, when the only things they could see around them were mangled versions of themselves?_

_His soles slipped on pieces on the floor that bumped and ground hollowly against each other, producing the only sound he could hear, the only indication that he was a living, _animate_ person, trudging through this dead glass infinity._

_He initially thought it was rather beautiful, in a pitiful way. It was like a set on the stage of a tragedy, designed to cage in the audience's despair and sympathy while the hero of the tale spiralled into madness. While Light had no intension of playing the tragic hero, it still felt like a trap of some sort, one that was created solely for him._

_The larger scraps would sometimes crack, jolting his nerves. Every now and then he thought he would fall and impale himself on the spikes and broken edges. _

_He briefly thought he heard Sayu, or somebody calling out, and he felt a hint of a presence behind him. He was about to turn when his breath caught in his throat and his heart throbbed hard, once. Then it was gone._

_Light could have sworn that, just for a moment, he had glimpsed his father's figure slip across the reflective surfaces around him._

* * *

_Wednesday 24 Feb,_ Sayu's pen scratched across the pastel coloured page. She then drew an umbrella and a sad face next to it.

_I think Mum thinks I'm depressed. _She began. _I'm not. People are meant to grief alone. She told me to talk to my friends from school, but it's not like I can just walk up to them and say, "Hey, I'm not sorry that I haven't been spending time with you cos I was sleeping the whole time then my dad and brother died." They would just gossip and then the whole campus would know about it._

She scrunched up her face and added angry eyebrows to the sad smiley.

_I did phone Chieri, Akane and Maki. Akane was very nice and she didn't ask me tell her about anything, not like Chieri. Chieri even wanted to know HOW they died. What the hell? Mum won't even tell me anything. Chieri can be such a cow sometimes. Akane was understanding so I told her I think Kira murdered them. _

Her hand trembled. She thought about crossing out the last sentence but Kira was a murderer, not a god. Besides, many people hated him too, like Akane.

_Akane said she understands how I feel cos she has a close childhood family friend (I think he's her secret boyfriend) whose father was killed by Kira quite a few years ago. He was a banker and the police suspected him in a robbery so Kira killed him. I never knew Akane hates Kira before. She had always been so against crime and all that._

Sayu wanted to end there, but she just began a new page and it looked bad with half a line hanging on top. So she continued.

_I'll go to the station and ask Matsuda tomorrow. He will tell me the truth about what really happened. _

She closed the glittery notebook and turned off the lamp. It would be a long day tomorrow.

* * *

"It's called hybrid vigour, shinigami," Near said, and Rester almost wanted to ask which aspect of education in Near's strange upbringing could touch on genetics.

"If you want to say something, then say it."

The truth was, Near did not know what that was exactly, really. Not as much as he would have preferred, as someone who speaks with so much certainty and conviction. He had simply wanted the bow-legged thing out of his sight.

The shinigami in question turned to him with a hopeful look.

"Can I get some of those high-bid vigour?"

Near briefly wondered what its previous companion had thought about its stream of endless requests and complaints.

"Do whatever you want."

"You sure? 'Cus humans don't react well to their apples floating off by themselves. Can't you get that black-haired guy to buy me some?"

"Gevanni is in Japan."

Near watched its departure though the steel-reinforced wall. His gaze skimmed past a triangle of pristine tiles protruding from under clusters of domino towers, and stopped abruptly on something that should not be here. _Someone_.

The stranger had come out of nowhere. Near wasn't sure what his initial feelings were when he spotted that figure, crouching on one of the few office chairs on the entire floor. The barefooted creature seemed relaxed, terribly so, as if he could not comprehend the implications of his intrusion on the territory of the current L. His posture was mocking, a picture of engrossment, face hidden behind his reading material.

Near's first coherent thought hit him violently, and it was nothing as comical as the scene before him.

Rester was down.

Then it occurred to him shortly that a breach in security, however impregnable, did not automatically warrant the death of the watch-keeper.

"Rester, identify the immediate intruder within this room."

There was a pause on the other end, and he almost embraced the dreaded fear that had crept up on him.

"Ah...can you specify his location?"

Rester's confusion was evident, and the weight in Near's chest morphed into a mixture of relieve and bewilderment. It had only been less than a month when he established a surveillance system covering every single room from every angle. Rester's failure to locate the intruder was simply impossible. Even if the infrared arrangement was not fully in place, this room had been the first to be installed with such detection cameras.

"Identify yourself." He didn't bother with niceties. This was his territory, his space, his empire of kingdoms of cards and unfaltering trains and triumphant dominoes, and indisputably his. Only the foolish of fools would challenge him.

The man's object of interest was lowered by a fraction in an almost deliberately sarcastic manner, and Near suddenly caught sight of two horrifically familiar words etched over the cover.

_It couldn't be._

How did this man, with no visible tools, managed to remove the Note from its safe of alloyed metal, multiple-combination dials and booby-traps?

And as he struggled to organise his thoughts, it came to him.

A shinigami. That would explain why Rester could not detect such an intrusion. Then it would also mean that the black notebook he was clutching in that peculiar way of his was not the same as the one in Near's possession.

The man's unblinking eyes met Near's over the top of the Note.

_When?_ Near rewound his memory at sixteen times the original pace_. When had he touched paper?_

"It seems like you have missed something, Near." The stranger said.

"Near," Rester interrupted, "do you need any assistance?"

"Not yet," Near replied.

The obnoxiously vague statement could be interpreted in two ways. Literally, he could be saying that there was somehow a loophole in the security, and this person had bypassed it, for all the elaborateness of its state-of-art surveillance system. On the other hand it could be aimed at Near personally, as a sort of provocation regarding his competency as L's replacement.

One of Rester's screens snapped to a plain white background. Lidner's voice cut into the flurries of activity in the room as he was poised over the controls, issuing out orders to guards.

"Rester, can you give me our budget figure for black-market purchases?" She paused. "Also, how much exactly is considered high-bid?"

* * *

**Thanks for reaching the end of this plotless chapter; please tell me if I've made any mistakes and suggestions for improvement is always, always welcome. By the way I'm not sure if people actually write Diaries this way, since the closest thing I have to a diary is a rant journal and it's not orange. Yeah, I know. I'm a random person. One of my hobbies is generating passwords.**

**Just some extra stuff you can ignore: the first chapter now is actually an edited version of its former self, because it had too much ranting and someone pointed out that inserting Japanese words in an English writing is weird so I changed that, for consistency's sake. The editing process destroyed my mind. It was that hard. Also, I upped the rating because I'm paranoid.**


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